Friday, February 17, 2017

Putin, Like Trump, Now Being Pressed to Take Harder Line Abroad to Shore Up His Own Position, Piontkovsky Says

Paul
Goble

Staunton, February 17 –Donald Trump,
as the scandal about the multiple and continuing contacts between his team and
Moscow grows, has come under increasing pressure from some in the Congress to
take a harder line against the Russian government in Ukraine and elsewhere than
he might have preferred in order to shore up his presidency.

That is widely recognized. But
Russian analyst Andrey Piontkovsky argues Vladimir Putin is now under similar
pressure to take a harder line against the US from those in the Moscow elite he
calls “the party of war” who are using the media to whip up anti-American
sentiments and demand aggressive action (svoboda.org/a/28313352.html).

To the extent that the commentator’s
conclusions are correct, that could presage a far greater deterioration in
relations between Washington and Moscow in the immediate future, a negative
trend driven not by geopolitical calculations on either side but rather by the
imperatives of domestic politics in both.

From the point of view of the
Russian “war party,” Piontkovsky argues, Putinhas been responsible for “three
serious foreign policy defeats” and has landed Russia in two wars that he does
not seem to have a clear way forward to get out of.That is a very dangerous situation for the
leader of any authoritarian regime.

Putin’s own approach and the Russian
elite political culture within which he operates requires “dynamism,” a sense
that Moscow is moving forward rather than drifting. Right now, many in the
Russian capital don’t have a sense that this is the case with Putin,
Piontkovsky argues.

And to the extent that such feelings
spread, he continues, some may begin to say to themselves and others the most
dangerous line in such countries – “the tsar is not a real one,” but rather a “false”
leader who must be shoved aside.To
counter the growth of such attitudes, Putin will have to take action.

Unlike Trump who has to deal with a
powerful Congress, Putin now has to face what for him is “a potentially more
dangerous group of the dissatisfied: a party of war, which every evening on all
federal television channels shows its insanity.”In the past, it was confidently assumed that
Putin controlled the media; but he may have created a Frankenstein monster.

Indeed, Piontkovsky suggests, what
is now happening in Russia before all our eyes is “the first not military but
television coup in the history of authoritarian regimes. It is no longer the
Kremlin which defines the agenda for television but television which defines
the agenda for the Kremlin.”

The only way for Putin to “hold on to
power for a certain time” is, the Russian commentator says, is, like the famous
case of one leader of the French Revolution who said he needed to find out
where the people were going so he could get ahead of them, to take over this “media
coup” by moving, at least for a time, in the direction the Moscow television
suggests.

It is unlikely that the Russian
media is either as independent from Putin or as powerful an influence on his
behavior as the Congress is on Putin, but Piontkovsky’s words deserve attention
as a reminder that the relationship between the media which Putin has used to
build power and Putin himself is more complicated than many, including possibly
him, recognize.

Three other reports this week
provide related perspectives.First,
Moscow journalist Arkady Babchenko argues that the simultaneous presence in
office of Putin and Trump means that for the first time in history, the two
countries with the most nuclear weapons are in the hands of “inadequate” people
(kasparov.ru/material.php?id=58A5D51C2E508).

Second, Maksim Kalashnikov says Trump
won’t so much change course on Russia – unlikely because it isn’t that
important to him – but rather be forced by problems at home to hand over
decision making on Moscow to the existing US foreign policy establishment which
he describes as consistently anti-Russian (forum-msk.org/material/fpolitic/12832599.html).